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Contributing to WordPress as a designer

A few weeks ago, I went to my first proper WordCamp, in London. I went as a designer, and I wasn’t expecting to learn very much, but spoiler warning: I was wrong. In this post, I will explain why going to a WordCamp is worthwhile as a designer, why WordPress needs more designers, and how designers reading this can start applying their skills to the WordPress design right now.

Wordcamps are not just for programmers and bloggers

You may have noticed I said ‘proper WordCamp’ in the opening, because technically my first one was WordCamp NL last year, but I’m not counting that one since I only went because Yoast had a booth there. And back in 2016, I didn’t think I had much business being at a WordCamp neither. Not because I thought I knew everything, but precisely the opposite; I hardly used WordPress. I wasn’t writing content, I just used it to upload comics I had drawn. Terms like conversion rate and cornerstone content didn’t mean much to me. It all seemed very technical. And especially the thought of contributing to the core of WordPress seemed very daunting (even writing my own theme took me ages). But WCLDN17 proved that I was wrong about all these things. 

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Almost a year after WCNL16, I became the UX designer at Yoast. I still didn’t know all the intricacies of WordPress, but I was using it a lot more, making sure our stuff integrated well and looked good. So maybe I could get some value out of a WordCamp this time around? I wasn’t sure yet. But off I went to WCLDN17.

Looking at the schedule, there were a lot more talks about design and UX than I had expected; Crispin Read talked about the value of testing and hard data over opinions; Sarah Semark talked about how modern web design all looks the same (and why); Graham Armfield talked about how some simple design measures can make sure your site is accessible to almost everyone; and Dave Walker‘s talk was especially interesting to me, because he’s also an illustrator using WordPress. It was clear that design was coming to the forefront, and rightly so.

This was all good info for me to apply at Yoast, but that I could be of value to WordPress was an unexpected discovery during Contributor Day.

WordPress needs designers too

Contributor Day is meant to focus the attention of everyone at a Wordcamp towards improving WordPress in some way. Naturally, I sat down at the Design table, and there I met Tammie Lister. She is a UX designer at Automattic – that’s the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, WooCommerce, and Simplenote (which I drafted this in!). She was easy to talk to, and very enthusiastic about design. But more importantly, she had prepared a few simple tasks for us to tackle that day. It made my entrance into the whole WordPress ecosystem pretty smooth.

My chosen task was to make a mockup for the mobile image editor; Something had gone really wrong in there, lots of overlapping panels and redundant buttons. By simply designing a fix in Photoshop, I helped move this problem closer towards being solved.

In doing so, I started to understand why Tammie kept wishing that more designers would start to look at WordPress itself. There are many design issues like this hanging around, waiting for a designer to solve them. Doing so may not seem like a big contribution, but WordPress is used by nearly 80 million sites – that’s almost 30% of the web. So whatever you end up doing, it’s guaranteed that at least a few people are going to be happy with it.

And I can understand why designers maybe don’t flock to this calling. Getting started can seem daunting – I was a prime example of this mindset. If that’s you too, then read on, I’ve outlined three simple steps to get you started.

Ways a designer can start improving WordPress

If you use WordPress and like designing interfaces, these are some quick ways to combine those two passions:

1. Go to a Contributor Day.

This may seem like a big first step, but I promise you it’s not. You’ll get set up way faster than you would at home by yourself, there are tons of people who can help, and everyone is super nice. I would have never known where to begin if it wasn’t for Tammy’s guidance. There are tons of WordCamps all around the world, so guaranteed that there is one near you and within your budget. If not, perhaps you’re lucky like me and your company works with WordPress, get them to send you out to one!

2. Join the design channel in the WordPress Slack.

I could tell you to go to http://ift.tt/1KOTVhc, but to be honest that site could use a UX update itself. No, I feel like it’s better just to get in touch with the people on the frontlines of WordPress design on Slack. Slack is a chat app, and you can join the WordPress team on there by going to this page. And when you’re in, simply introduce yourself in the design channel and ask how you can help, and somebody will get you started.

3. If you’re not a designer…

…show a passionate designer some of the issues on this list. Hopefully, there’s a good chance they’ll get triggered to fix these little design problems. Sometimes even just posting feedback is enough to get the ball rolling again. Together with this article, I’m sure they can take it from there.

Bonus: Submit design tickets

If your own projects are keeping you busy enough (and I can relate), here’s a really simple way you can still help out: for every weird design issue you encounter, just make a ticket on the site I linked above. Leave the work to others, but at least let them know what they should fix. You’re helping them out, and when they fix it they’re helping you out. Everybody’s happy.

So if all this has motivated you to contribute your design expertise to WordPress: great! I hope to see you at a WordCamp or on Slack someday. Together, we can make WordPress even better, for everyone.

Photo by the talented Pradeep Singh.

Read more: ‘WordPress Core Contributions’ »

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Page speed as a ranking factor: what you need to know

It’s official: Google announced that page speed will be a ranking factor in its mobile-first index. But what does that mean? There’s no beating around the bush anymore: you should work on making your site as fast and accessible as possible. Don’t wait, do it now. I mean it.

For years, we’ve been bombarded by one message: mobile is going to take over the world. We needed to adapt ourselves to this new reality where everyone does everything on their mobile devices. While we still spend loads of time in front of our desktop and laptop machines, we can’t deny mobile is crucial. Just look at the upcoming markets, where people use their mobile for all possible tasks.

We also know that if you want to compete with the big boys, get a solid ranking for your mobile site and make some money from it, you need to take care of a few things. One of the most important ones is page speed. 

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Let’s look at some recent research: according to Google the average time it takes for a mobile landing page to load is now 22 seconds. Compare that with the three seconds visitors need to decide if they want to stay for your page to load and you will see a huge discrepancy. People are impatient. They want something, and they want it now. While page speed is important for your SEO, it is even more important for your UX, conversion and general customer happiness.

Yes, page speed will be a ranking factor

At the moment, page speed is more of an indicator than a ranking factor. Unless your mobile site is extremely slow, you can still get decent rankings with average page speeds. But it’s been proven time and time again that the speedier your site, the better your results will be.

Google’s latest research shows that the chance of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s. 1s to 5s increases the chance to 90% and if your site takes up to 10s to load, the chance of a bounce increases to 123%. That’s incredible. For search engines, better results and performance is a sign of a healthy site that pleases customers and therefore should be rewarded with a higher ranking.

Also, Google has recently gone on record saying that page speed will be a ranking factor in its upcoming mobile-first index. Details on how they will evaluate page speed for mobile and calculate rankings are still unknown. But, what we do know doesn’t change much from what we at Yoast have been saying for some time: make sure your site is responsive, as fast as possible, solidly structured, and full of excellent content.

5 ways to speed up your site

Do everything in your power to increase the loading speed of your mobile site. Everyone loves a fast site: we SEOs and search engines, but most importantly, our customers. Firstly, check Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see what they advise you to do. Secondly, take a look at the size of your page, as many sites are bloated nowadays. Try to shave off as much as you can by optimizing images, compressing code and loading fewer external scripts and ads. In addition to that, here are five things you can work on:

Activate AMP on your pages

Google’s AMP project is meant to give the web a necessary speed boost. It’s not too hard to implement, and it will give your mobile site a life in the fast-lane. According to Google, AMP is not a ranking factor, but it’s not hard to predict it has a decent chance to become one. Read Google’s documentation on how to implement AMP.

Use HTTP2

That series of tubes we call the internet is at the dawn of a new age. Several new technologies will bring much-needed upgrades to the way the underlying infrastructure has been built. One of these is called HTTP2, and you can already use to speed up your site, barring it uses HTTPS. Find out more on performance optimization in an HTTP2 world.

Switch to PHP7

As we mainly use WordPress in these parts, getting everyone to use PHP7 is a big deal. To get everyone to move from unsupported and unsafe versions, like PHP5.2 and PHP5.3, we at Yoast created Project WHIP. Moving to PHP7 will give your WordPress site a speed boost, keep it secure and make it future proof.

General optimizations

You should already know these tactics. Please use a CDN to make sure that your content is delivered from a location close to the visitor. Use a caching plugin like WP Rocket to keep static parts of your site in the browser cache. Last but not least, please optimize images. That’s low-hanging fruit.

Critical rendering path

Running a PageSpeed Insights test will show you which elements block a page from rendering quickly. The critical rendering path is formed by the object – like CSS and JavaScript – that have to load before the content can show up on screen. If this content is blocked, your page will render slowly or not at all. Pay attention to this and keep the path free of obstacles. At modpagespeed.com you’ll find several open source tools to help you with these issues.

Always work on your page speed

Keep in mind that your work is never done. Your mobile site is never too fast, and your customers will never come flocking to you when you shave off just a little of your loading time. Keep working on it. Now, tomorrow and next month. If possible, try to automate your PageSpeed Insights testing, so you get regular updates. Follow the news to see if there are new ways to speed up your site.

Read more: ‘How to improve your mobile site’ »

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Google AdWords Upgrades Dynamic Search Ads

Google AdWords has recently made a number of improvements to Dynamic Search Ads which they claim to make the service better and more effective than ever. Here’s what you need to know:

More Control

Page Feeds essentially allows advertisers to dictate precise URLs for use with Dynamic Search Ads. What this does is that it helps Dynamic Search Ad Campaigns directly control the service to only show products and services that are relevant to each customer.

Google takes advantage of this service by allowing advertisers to provide them a direct feed of what the advertiser wants to promote as well as direct links to the relevant landing pages. After this process, Dynamic Search Ads will from then on create ads solely based on the URLs that was provided to them by the advertiser so long as the advertiser sets their campaign to “Use URLs from my page feed only.”

Google has a guide to creating Page Feeds along with the corresponding info that you made need.

Dynamic Search Ads Better Than Ever

According to Google, Dynamic Search Ad Campaigns will finally be able to support or accommodate “expanded text” ads which basically means advertisers can now input lengthier headlines and descriptions for whatever service or product that they wish to advertise.

Google has made it clear that this update will be made available to the general public sometime this month.

Relevant Ads Now The Status Quo

According to Google, they are improving the efficiency as well as the impact of their Dynamic Search Ads Campaign by directly showing relevant content to the users. According to Google, Advertisers, as well as Content Creators, are noting an increase in their conversion rate because of these updates.

Key Takeaway

Google’s recent changes have been nothing but beneficial to searchers and content creators alike. They are continuing the trend of making Google better both aesthetically and technically speaking. Google aspires to perform better every day and this is evident in their almost daily updates to their algorithm. The challenge now is keeping up with Google’s changes.

As someone who spends his free time writing and reading (sometimes I do both at the same time,) it is a challenge to keep up with Google’s changes. You have to take note of everything as well as make sure that your website conforms to Google’s standards. You also have to manage and maintain your relationship with your readers as well as keep them entertained or wanting for more. There are many factors that contribute to a website’s ‘success’ but the best and most effective one is of course hard work.

The only reason I’m writing this article is to inform everyone of what’s going to be happening with Google’s AdWords. I believe that everyone should stay up-to-date, especially with matters pertaining to Google. Despite it all, I’m still a fan of good old-fashioned SEO and making websites rank the Google way.

My advice for both beginners as well as veterans alike is that you should never be satisfied with your website, both aesthetically as well as performance-wise. There’s always something that you can improve. It can be your content itself or your Robots.txt file for all we know. The only constant with SEO is that you either adapt or die.

What are your thoughts on AdWords’ changes? Do you like them? Do you have any experience with them? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below!

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A Business Trick No One Else is Teaching You

Mark’s a smart and driven guy, but he’s feeling a bit down. He feels like his big plans took a hit and that he’s probably past the point where he can do the role he dreamed of doing for so long. The only thing is, I don’t think Mark’s even 30 years old yet and he’s talking like an old man who has given up. I’ll explain how Mark can fix this at the very end.

A Business Trick For You: Sequence

One of the least talked about details in business is understanding the importance of sequence. This isn’t a tricky word, but just in case. I mean do this, then this, then this other thing. Step 1, step 2, step 3.

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The REAL Impact of RankBrain on Web Traffic

The REAL Impact of RankBrain on Web Traffic was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

We’re entering a new era of optimizing for search engines.

And no, SEO is not dead.

While many things stay the same in search, we can’t deny the new path we’re on with the introduction of machine-learning systems like Google’s RankBrain.

The concept of RankBrain may seem technical and daunting, but it’s one that CMOs — not just technically savvy SEOs — must understand to be competitive in the months to come.

In this post I cover:

What RankBrain is.

How search results are changing.

How to evolve your digital marketing strategy for machine learning search algorithms.

And why you might need PPC advertising even more than ever.

An Intro to RankBrain

RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that came onto the scene in 2015. Bloomberg was the first among mainstream media to break the news of RankBrain, Google’s newest addition to search rankings.

And while we officially discovered RankBrain in 2015, Google was talking about it as early as 2013.

RankBrain is designed to better understand the meaning behind a searcher’s words. This 2013 post at Google discusses this concept of understanding word relationships if you want to learn more.

From the Bloomberg article we learned that 15 percent of queries per day have never been seen by Google before. RankBrain helps interpret those novel queries.

At the heart of RankBrain is a goal to better interpret search queries and serve the most relevant search results. This has been a lifelong goal of Google Search.

We discuss this at greater length in our SEM Synergy podcast http://ift.tt/2osDOms (July 2016) here.

Mobile: A Primary Driver of RankBrain’s Existence

Mobile drove the need for RankBrain even further. Mobile search behavior has been a game-changer, especially when it comes to voice search, something a lot of mobile users take advantage of.

As you may know, queries tend to be much more conversational using voice search versus typing.

RankBrain deals well with the long-tail queries that are common to voice search today, though there are plenty of long-tail searches typed into a search bar, too.

I believe that RankBrain is preparing for a world where voice search will become more and more the norm.

Remember, voice search is already on the rise. In a presentation by Mary Meeker on the popular 2016 internet trends report, we see that voice search is up 7x since 2010.

And it’s not just voice search coming from mobile devices. Now, we have to consider things like voice assistants such as Google Home, where it remains to be seen how the device’s answers will pull from web results.

Here’s What RankBrain Does

RankBrain was designed to better analyze the language of websites in Google’s index, and then apply that analysis to a search query. By better understanding the search query it can better match users with websites and pages.

The purpose is to better understand the meaning of content and the intent behind a search query.

Once RankBrain better understands the intent, it can then presumably apply the appropriate Google algorithm signals that deserve the most weight for that query.

Along with being able to understand concepts on a web page better, RankBrain also allows for a better understanding of the association between multiple queries, like:

“Where is the Eiffel Tower?”

Followed by:

“How tall is it?”

How Does RankBrain Learn? Examples of RankBrain in Action

Essentially, RankBrain can take sets of “training” data created by humans to help establish a baseline, and then can apply machine learning to determine the best search results based on a variety of factors over time.

Google confirmed in the Bloomberg article and in this article at Search Engine Land that they periodically update the system by giving it new data to better reason with new concepts.

At SMX West 2016, some presenters shared examples of RankBrain in action.

One study showed how RankBrain better interpreted the relationships between words.

This could include the use of stop words in a search query (“the,” “without,” etc.) — words that were historically ignored by Google but are sometimes of critical importance to understanding the intent behind a query.

For example, take the television series “The Office.” It’s an example of a search that would be taken out of context without the all-important “the.”

Here’s another example query from an interview with Googler Gary Illyes: “Can you get 100% score on Super Mario without walk-through?” Ignoring “without” would potentially return search results on getting a 100 percent score on Super Mario with a walk-through … so the opposite of the results a person was trying to get.

There are other theories on how RankBrain might use data to learn what the best results are for a search query. It’s possible that searchers’ engagement with the search results may be a factor in how RankBrain determines the relevancy of a result, as Rand Fishkin posits in a keynote from July 2016.

For example, if someone clicks on a search result and doesn’t go back to the search results to start clicking on other websites, this could indicate the searcher found what they were looking for.

The machine could then learn over time that a low bounce rate signals a relevant result, so that web page could show up more often and higher in search results.

Here’s a visual of that concept from Fishkin’s presentation:

How RankBrain Works with Other Ranking Signals

As I mentioned earlier, RankBrain is essentially built into the query process to better understand language and make an improved match between the search query and the websites in the Google index.

Remember that Google still has hundreds of other signals it can apply to a search query to identify the best results.

In 2016, however, Google confirmed that RankBrain was among its top 3 ranking signals for search. Rounding out the top 3 are content and links.

This is an important concept to understand. Google clearly stated that the signals that we’ve come to know to be important and that we’ve been optimizing for still matter: content and links.

While the content on a website and its links are both essential to determining meaning and relevance, RankBrain works in partnership by assisting the Google search engine to better determine if a website is the most relevant based on signals and algorithms, given the searcher’s intent.

The Impact of RankBrain on Big Brands

With machine learning, RankBrain learns associations over time. That means, if a brand becomes associated with a certain product, the queries about that product may lead to more branded search results.

Because Google tends to favor big brands online for a variety of reasons, with RankBrain things like the site’s engagement rate, mentions of the brand across many social sites and so on could further enhance favoritism here.

This could happen despite the fact that some bigger brands may have a weaker link profile than other websites in their space.

What RankBrain Means for Your SEO and Digital Marketing Strategy

OK, now for some action items …

SEO and Your Content

First, let’s talk content. For many, it’s actually business as usual.

Examine your content to ensure it provides the best, most complete answers to a query, whether you’re an informational page or selling a product.

RankBrain is a machine learning system but it still needs input from your website.

Yes, it’s working to better make connections about concepts. For example, we can give RankBrain credit for understanding a page is about baseball even if the word is never used and only “Chicago Cubs” and “New York Yankees” are present on a page.

Absolutely one of the goals of SEO is to better help search engines understand what your content is about. It is still vital that you make sure you’re including the keywords that are important to your business on your website page.

This includes keyword “stemming” (like “walked” and “walking” along with “walk” and “walks”) and using synonyms and natural word variations to help make connections between ideas.

One example we use in our SEO training classes is the word “mercury.” You can use “mercury” 10 times on a page, but if you forget to use the word “planet,” then the search engine may be confused about the subject of the page. Is it an element, car, insurance or other?

This is also a time to explore structured data markup, which helps search engines better make connections as to what is on the page.

Remember, the little things matter as they always have in SEO.

You’ll want to continue to pay attention to making your search results listings stand out in the crowd. That means ensuring each web page has custom meta data in addition to exploring other ways you can make it stand out using schema markup and useful, engaging copy.

Another question to ask: Once people land on your website, is it helping them along their journey even further by offering up related content that explores a topic/product/service more?

This can be accomplished by siloing your content to create subject themes around the key terms that are important to your business.

Subject organization chart aka siloing

RankBrain and Digital Marketing Strategies

I mentioned earlier that RankBrain will likely favor big brands. So what happens if you’re not a big brand?

Now is the time to start thinking about how to supplement your digital marketing strategy, if you haven’t already.

While it’s a great idea to have a thorough SEO strategy, it’s never a great idea to put all your eggs into one basket.

So in the era of RankBrain, even though the basics of SEO that we know and love are still important, you’ll want to think of creative ways to grab that SERP real estate.

That means if you’re not in the upper echelon of brands online in your space, consider supplementing your search marketing strategy with pay per click ads.

RankBrain Is Not the End of SEO

If you’ve been concerned about how RankBrain impacts SEO, there’s possibly more to worry about than you may think.

RankBrain is search results relevance on steroids. Simply put, you must improve your content relevancy to match the query intent. Yes, SEO best practices are critical to traffic, and rankings are more competitive than ever.

But you must also focus on your content from a macro and micro level, and how your website’s content as a whole helps to answer the questions your audience is looking for.

And don’t forget to supplement your digital marketing strategy with things like paid search, social and other channels to keep your brand top of mind.

Do you have insights on the impact of RankBrain on search rankings? I want to know. Leave a comment below.

We can help with your RankBrain optimized SEO strategy. Our services are tailor-made to match your goals and audience. For more revenue through digital marketing, let’s talk.

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Ask Yoast: Too many links in navigation menu?

Doing your internal linking well has quite a few SEO benefits. Connecting related posts with each other lets Google know that you’ve created content on various aspects of a certain topic. This can make you a stronger candidate to rank for that topic. But, can internal links also be detrimental to your site? Is it possible to create too many internal links, for example by having lots of links in your navigation? That’s what this Ask Yoast is about!

Jeroen Custers of Agrifirm emailed us with a question regarding navigation links:

“We have a top menu with a sub menu on every page of our online shop and in Google Search Console I see that some pages are linked more than 15,000 times. And our homepage is linked 25,000 times. Is this a problem?”

Check out the video or read the answer below!

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

Buy now » Info Navigation links and SEO

Well yes and no. If your menu structure, overall, is so big and it’s loaded in the top of your page, then that might not always be the best idea for your SEO. One of the things that we used to do in the old days – that I still like to do sometimes now – is load the menu at the bottom of the page. Why?

Because that means that you’re showing the content first and you’re showing the links in the content to Google first, and then you’re showing them the entire menu. Not even thinking about page rank, this order of things makes slightly more sense to Google. And it might also make more sense to blind people and other people that visit your website. So, if you can do that, then that would be beneficial.

Also, if your menu is too big, I don’t always really appreciate that as a customer. But that’s something that you have to test with your customers and visitors. Investigate what works best and whether your navigation menu isn’t too big and cumbersome to work with. But that’s more of a UX question, than really an SEO question.

Good luck!”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need some advice about SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Read more: ‘Site structure: the ultimate guide’ »

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